MRH: In your song writing, certainly for non-film projects, you’ve done a lot of melodic work, and I wonder if that’s helped you in developing themes for characters?

LC: Absolutely. That is very important, and in a show like Heroes, it’s been great with so many lead characters to give everyone a little theme. It is important to have a little bit of a melodic stance. Really the fun part of scoring is putting a simple melody into different situations; you can play it scary, happy, silly or dreamy, and it makes scoring actually a lot easier because you don’t have to write music all the time – you just write moods. If you come up with a motif for a character or a situation, you’re much better off, and that’s pretty much the job.

MRH: How did you get involved with Heroes, because I had heard of Tim Kring when he did a really short-lived TV series called Strange World (1999)?

LC: That was a young Tim Kring, but then he got a couple of jobs writing for TV shows, and eventually developed Crossing Jordan (2001-2007)… We got hired to do that series because we had a relationship with Allan Arkush who had hired us on another short-lived series called Snoops (1999), which was a David E. Kelly show, and of course David Kelly was married to Michelle Pfeiffer, so he kind of knew of us, and trusted Allan when he came up with the idea [to hire us].

[Allan is] very musically eccentric and wanted something different for this show, and he had heard that we were into scoring and he was wondering, ‘Who can I get that’s kind of different? What are Wendy and Lisa doing? Let’s have a meeting with them.’ We met Allan, and we just hit it off as friends, and we’ve done pretty much everything Allan’s ever done since Snoops.

Then Allan got hired onto Crossing Jordan and suggested us to Tim... When Tim came up with the Heroes idea, he wanted us to do that with him, and it was such a lucky break. It’s been a dream working on that show because the usual protocol is to write the music and then do playback for the directors and the executives, and they give you notes and then you go back and do rewrites.

With Heroes, we’ve just been able to watch the show after they put their first edit together, and then we take it away and we have about five days at the most – lately it’s been like three days – to write the score. We just deliver it, and they mix it.

MRH: One of the things that impressed me about the pilot episode and certainly the one or two episodes that followed, is there’s a huge amount of information that has to be processed by the viewer and a huge amount of characters that they have to warm up to.

That’s got to have been one of the bigger challenges where you had to write music so people would bond with the characters and understand them, because one of the hardest parts in making a pilot is getting people hooked on the show.

For example, I can recall that I didn’t like the pilot for Homicide (1993-1999), and I didn’t like the show’s jump cut style, but later on I watched it and a few episodes again, and then I warmed up to it, and I think the music helped because it’s new characters with which you have to bond.

LC: Absolutely. There are choices that you make when you are scoring, like whether to just emphasize a character. What we really wanted to do and still try to do is to create an atmosphere, so that in that entire hour when you’re sitting there watching the show, it’s not too jarring… Every time it cuts to another scene and another character and another place, there has to be this cohesive quality… There’s so much information and you don’t want to overwhelm the viewers, but you just want to make them feel a certain way.

For instance, there was a scene where Claire rushes in to save a man from a burning train, and where typically you might do heavy drums and percussion and action style music, we went the other way and we made it dreamy, and it was just this hollow glass pad sound and a voice, and they took out all the production sound so it was really quiet. It just made the scene much more psychologically affective because it was this little girl in a cheerleader’s outfit discovering she could save this guy. Her uniform caught on fire, but she wasn’t hurt, and it was very odd, and it wasn’t like a cop show scene.

We ended up scoring a lot of scenes like that; when something action-oriented would happen, we went counter-intuitive, and made it more like a dream sequence rather than an action movie.

MRH: I think that’s one of the reasons I noticed the music in the pilot because it had a very interesting sound. You’ve incorporated some instruments that maybe aren’t unusual, but they’re used in unusual ways without transforming the scores into a kind of world music style, and that approach elegantly ties together all the disparate characters from around the world, and some of the characters who’ve have converged in New York City.

Your approach is maybe unusual for TV because sometimes there’s a reliance on going for standard action writing and the use of sounds from music libraries.

LC: We buy the same library discs as everybody, but I’m really super-sensitive to that, and when I watch TV or see a movie and hear a sound that I know, I cringe; we really do take our time to use it in a different way or put in an effect or tune it down.

I’ve always played samples “wrong” so they don’t sound like how they’re supposed to sound, but that also seems to lend itself to the show because these are humans that are kind of being morphed into super-humans or have these powers or abilities that kind of change into whatever ‘the normal’ is, so when you make a sound ‘more than normal,’ then it goes along with the feeling of the show.

Thank you for noticing that, because it is something that we take time and work on, and it was part of the mission - having the show take place all over the world. Even though we do sometimes go to Japan and play Japanese instruments, we like to mix it up more, because the world is becoming more and more integrated… and it’s so unimportant to be specific in that way, I think, especially with a show like this where it’s a human story, and everyone is coming together and sharing something.

So yeah, we buy the same libraries as everybody else, but we just mess them up and distort them and put delays and tune them down. The libraries are incredible, and they get better and better. Every time you buy one, you hear ‘the new one’ and go ‘I want that one,’ spending thousands of dollars on libraries, but then if you use the pure sample, you’re going to hear it some place else, and that’s not composing; it’s a scrapbook or something.